Farmall Regular information

HEllo, I am doing a project for school on the row crop tractor and how its invention changed farming. Can anyone suggest a book about the farmall regular? I already have numerous books but there are always more to get. Thank you and God bless.
Andrew Anderson

Some stuff to keep you busy

http://www.digitalbookindex.org/_search/search010agricultureequipmenta.asp

http://www.archive.org/search.php?query=international%20harvester

http://content.wisconsinhistory.org/cdm4/document.php?CISOROOT=/ihc&CISOPTR=5047&REC=2&CISOSHOW=

(this is a temporary sit) https://mywebspace.wisc.edu/lcgrady/web/DCB.htm

http://nebraskacowman.com/T_T_Link_page.html

And here's another
teh "Seed Time" and "Harvest" books by Hutchinson are must reads

http://www.archive.org/search.php?query=mccormick

Rather broad for the topic you're researching, but to get an idea of machines leading up to it and following the Regular as well 150 Years of International Harvester by CH Wendel is a pretty good book. Only a few pages on the Regular, but a chapter on pretty much every item IH ever made.

Been reading this book myself. Does a great job explaining the evolution of the Farmall and who was responsible for it.
Farmall Dynasty

I would suggest to take it one step further and ask how everyone on this site would see how it changed. And perhaps a few other tractor sites. You probably will feel the earth tremble as everyone postes a reply.

It may produce alot of things that you would over look otherwise. And the price is right also.

How about asking writers to this forum to give you their takes on this topic? I think many of us old-timers could write at least a short book on their experiences with various row-crop tractors. My experience is mostly with IHC tractors--one 10-20 "standard" tractor ("non-cultivating," in other words) and a number of row-crop tractors ("Regular" Farmall, F-20, F-12 [3 of 'em], A, B, H and Super M, plus a little time on a 1930 Oliver Hart-Parr Row-Crop.
Here's my brief take on this topic:
Early "tractors" were really engines on wheels, whose primary function was to operate threshers and silo fillers "on the belt." Then they were put to doing heavy work in the fields. These early tractors were enormous, heavy, slow, cumbersome. Sometime just before World War I, it was realized (sorry, that sounds like an "It was decided" statement by a government official--which means you don't know who decided it, or more likely, you don't want to say; in my case, I don't know)--back to sentence--it was decided that farmers needed a tractor that would replace horses, especially in cultivating corn, I believe. Such a tractor would have to be fairly small and easy to maneuver through row-crops. Some of the early attempts at producing such a machine were pretty pathetic, from what I have read about them. They were often spindly and not much good for hard work. International Harvester did some experimenting before the Farmall came out, I think. Eventually, they produced the Farmall, which was, for its day, fairly agile, AND it was powerful enough and sturdy enough to do heavy work (it would pull 2 14" plows at about 3 mph, or a 7' double-disk harrow). This tractor, incidentally, was almost unbreakable. I knew people who were using "Regulars" made in the late 20s right up into the 1950s. They were crude, rough-riding, noisy, but they kept right on ticking, as the old Timex ad used to say.
One of the ingenious things IHC did was to create a very wide range of machines to be attached TO the Farmall: cultivators of various types and for various crops, a mounted cornpicker, a mounted mower, various kinds of special plows, AND, toward the end of the 1920s, a mechanical powerlift to raise the heavy stuff. I might mention that IHC had dealers who were placed not too far apart, so that farmers could make a short trip to get parts--very important back in the 20s and 30s when a 5-mile jaunt on a washboard gravel road was considered a "trip"--you drove at 20 mph AND your backside took a beating. Other manufacturers had good tractors, sometimes more advanced than the IHC models (think of the Oliver 70 with a smooth six-cylinder engine in the mid 30s, when IHC was still producing an essentially 1920s design in the F-20 and F-30, with their big, thumping engines). I have always thought that having dealers close by was the reason that, in my part of the world, at least (central NJ), most farmers used IHC equipment.
Incidentally, I have never found evidence in anything published by IHC that the company ever used the name "Regular" for this tractor. The F-20 has basically the same chassis and engine as the original Farmall, and unless you know some of the details, they look a lot alike. In fact, from a distance, they are not easy to tell apart. I have heard farmers ask, "Is that an F-20 you got there?" The answer was, "No, it's just a regular Farmall," meaning "original, not an F-20." I will say that in one piece of old sales literature I saw recently, I did see the Farmall referred to as "the regular Farmall," but it clearly was not meant as a name--it just meant, "not F-20." Most of the sales literature of the 30s compares the F-series with the "original Farmall." The success and originality of the original Farmall was a big selling point for the later models--carrying on a tradition and all that sort of thing.
The name "Farmall" was meant to tell farmers that the tractor would replace horses: it had a belt pulley, like the older tractors; it had a power takeoff for operating mowers and cornpickers and the like; it could do the "light work," like cultivating, raking and so on; AND, it could do the heavy work like plowing and disking. I don't think IHC invented the "cultivating tractor" idea, but they certainly did make that idea work.
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Another thought, about how the Farmall changed farming. This tractor and others of the same type were meant to replace horses. This meant that fewer workers might be needed, and that feed crops that previously had gone to the horses could either be sold for money, or fed to more cattle. When World War II came along (1941 for the U.S.), many men who might have been available for farm work were drafted or enlisted in the military services. Farmers bought machines like combines, cornpickers and forage harvesters to replace the hired men. These machines are expensive, however, and no doubt a fair amount of the income from the farm had to go toward the purchase and maintenance of the machines. I see this as a kind of spiral which has led to the large farms of today, which are operated by very few people driving very big machines. My grandfather made a good living with 30 milk cows. Today, I am told by accountants, it takes 300 cows to make a profitable dairy--largely mechanized both in the barn and out. My father tried to make a living by growing corn and beans on about 150 acres, and found the income to be pretty sparse. The same accountant told me that it requires 2 or 3 thousand acres to make a good living with crop farming. Very expensive, however, because of the huge tractors, plows, harvesters, etc., needed to make the thing go. This may be primitive economics, but it seems to me, at least, that replacing horses--and lots of cheap manual labor--with machines has led to a totally different kind of farming, most unlike the "family farms" of 100-200 acres that I grew up with in the 1930s and 1940s. Now, it's a real business, needing, you guessed it, an accountant, as well as all the land and machinery I've just talked about. I'd be interested in the comments of active or recently-retired farmers about this. I did not go into farming for a living, even though I continued to help my father on his farm whenever I could right up to the time of his death in the late 1980s. My views are more of the armchair expert kind of thing--maybe just a puff of wind.

Some more palaver:
The Farmall didn't change farming alone, but it set a model for other companies who imitated the basic idea. Some tractors were built in a similar manner ("cranked" rear axle, wheels bolted to a flange at the end of the axle), while in time, others came up with improvements (the Oliver Row-Crop, about 1930, with BIG wheels that could be slid in and out on the axles for different row widths, and the F-12, 1932, which also used sliding wheels). IHC and other companies produced all kinds of machines that could be used with or mounted on the tractor.
An illustration of what I was saying about the change in labor requirements. When I was very young, in the late 30s and early 40s, my father and his siblings each farmed about 150 acres. In order to harvest the wheat on one of those farms, each of the brothers and their hired men (usually, one per farm), AND their kids, too, gathered at each farm in turn. They each brought one tractor and one flatbed truck. The thresher was owned by all four of them, and was pulled from farm to farm when needed. One of the tractors on the farm operated the thresher on the belt (they had 10-20s or F-20s for this). In order to feed the monster, all the trucks and wagons were kept moving constantly. Each of the trucks or tractor/wagon combination required a driver, somebody on the load to stack the wheat sheaves, probably two people on the ground with pitchforks to break down the stacks and fork the sheaves up on the wagon or truck. At the thresher, you needed somebody to pitch the sheaves up from the truck, one person to feed the sheaves into the thresher, and at least one person on the ground to put bags on the thesher and move and tie up the full bags (this happened pretty fast when the thesher was fed properly). All in all, I'd say a typical threshing crew was about 8 or 9 adults, plus several kids old enough to help (drive a wagon, tie grain bags). The wives of these people also came to cook up a delicious country dinner (roast beef and gravy, mashed potatoes, wonderful pies). The meals were real "fun fests," with everybody telling jokes or gossip about locals (who weren't there, obviously).
Well, about 1943, one of the men in this extended family bought a small combine and then did all four of the farms. Only two people were required to operate this rig, and that only because it had a bagging platform instead of a tank. The bags were slid off onto the ground and picked up either later, or simultaneously by someone who wasn't operating the combine. If the weather cooperated, it would have been possible to do all of this with just two operators, assuming that the bags would be picked up and carted to the barn after the combine was shut down for the day.
The same kind of cooperative family arrangement was true of silo filling--big crew, trucks and tractors and wagons, lots of hand labor. When the field-chopper became popular sometime in the forties, only a handful of people could fill the silo. And then there is the corn (ears) harvest, which became a one- or two-person operation after the cornpicker became common (middle forties where I lived).